The Daily Huddle at Gulf Broadcast

People go into business to make money. Right? Maybe. But that’s definitely not the primary reason for starting a business. Most entrepreneurs start businesses to answer needs, to solve problems and to make people’s lives better.

In order to achieve those objectives, a business needs to be sustainable and predictable. All of these are achieved through specialists who exercise their skills to contribute to the success of the company. They work as a team toward a common objective. And in order to do that, everyone needs to communicate to ensure that everyone is aligned to the company goals. Without communication, the company’s direction will be aimless and its success will be questionable at best.

One of the best methods I’ve found that ensures this alignment is a short structured team meeting. We call that meeting the Daily Huddle which everyone attends.

The first time I heard of Daily Huddles was through Verne Harnish’s book “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits“. It was an eye-opener for me. I delved deeper in to the psychology of the huddle when I met him for the first time in Doha, Qatar a few years ago while attending an entrepreneurship conference held by the Qatar chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organisation. We discussed how other global companies apply this meeting and what discoveries they have made that allowed them to fine-tune the meetings to their objectives and situations. He was intrigued with how I developed the Daily Huddle to suite Gulf Broadcast.

Our Daily Huddle at Gulf Broadcast is a stand-up round-robbin style alignment meeting. We start our huddle every morning promptly at 08:37 and end it at or before 08:45. We conduct the meeting standing-up because we intentionally don’t want the meeting to last long. We start it at the odd time of 08:37 because we found that people actually get to be on time. People are accustomed to the cardinal times and get to be a bit more tardy then. For us anyway, this time works just fine.

The huddle is structured around a published agenda. It consists of four distinct segments:

Good News: Share your good news and achievements. These might include new sales, goals achieved and individual accomplishments.

What’s up? Share your updates and challenges. These are not to-do lists, but higher goals that we aim to achieve on the day; at the start of the week we declare our weekly goals which will help the individual drive his or her contribution to the company’s annual objectives, or “rocks” as we call them.

What’s in your way? Mention the challenges/bottlenecks you face, if a problem requires more than a one liner resolution during the huddle, we take it offline. Challenges, bottlenecks, problems must be mentioned. The only people who don’t get stuck are those who aren’t doing anything!

We encourage our team members to connect after the huddle to resolve an issue, offer help or simply offer congratulations.

Since we started this huddle a few years ago, we’ve hardly experienced any disconnects. The huddle inculcated transparency and staff feel empowered and knowledgeable. The Daily Huddle also has another huge advantage in that it inherently enforces accountability as we all know what each of us is up to. All of this results in the creation of a cohesive caring team that drives the company forward toward its short and long term goals.

Do you carry out any of these alignment meetings? Please let us know how you and your company has benefitted from them and what structure do you adopt. You may enter that in a comment below, or email me directly at m@gb.bh. I would love to hear from you.